Angel & Demons

3rd place winning awarded ctg.events at Moscow International Foto Awards 2017 While the SS. Crucifix Confraternity black banner starts appearing from the Church’s gate and the band plays the first notes of the dead march Lugete Veneres, the hooded men come out, lining up in pairs, within its sound. At about 19 o’clock, the ceremony begins: the statues are lifted and taken by the shoulders and since the first steps inside the Church, people make starting the characteristic cunnulella, an oscillating and simultaneous movement of the shoulders and of the whole body, that consists in taking the statue while making two steps ahead and one behind. The black banner, with the Confraternity emblems, peeps out from the door of the Church, rolled up for the Christ’s death mourning. Other hooded brothers are behind, organized in lines with lighted torchs. The Mysteries start coming out from the Church, making the cunnulella. The procession is closed by the Three Marys, three statues of the Grieved Virgin and other two women (Maria Maddalena and another woman). The Three Marys wear black clothes and jewels offered by the people. The brothers have the face covered from a hook punched near the eyes for penance and they walk behind the banner, which is hanged by two young participants. The procession is followed by a huge quantity of barefoot women in mourning, who pray Christ to give them the needed grace, while taking heavy church candles. The slow, rhythmic, rolling movement of the Mysteries is preannounced from the lugubrious sound of a cornet played by a brother since the morning, that prepares the souls to the passage of the Dead Christ. While the procession is passing through, the carraciuni (enormous bonfires, made up by faggots curled up and prepared into all the quarters in which the procession passes through) are lighted; in the meanwhile, the three cantors of the Miserere start singing the mournful notes of the aria from the narrowest corners of the Durazzo’s or Catalan buildings into the old town centre. Of courde, the way back is the most evocative, moving and romantic: the groups place themselves one behind the other while the Miserere song and the dead march Vella (from the name of the author). The procession goes back to the San Giovanni a Villa’s Church. The tradition considers that people eat a menu prepared for the occasion, made of fried or baked salted codfish, pizzas with tomato and vegetables, tuna, olives, onions, aged cheese, mozzarella, scagliozzi (little fried polenta’s triangles), fennels and tangerines.